AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I changed my shirt for something with a high neck.
Did you enjoy that? Are you sure? Did you molest that baby?
That memory still had the power to make me shudder.
“Cold, baby? Want me to turn down the A/C?”
“No, darling. I think we should take advantage of it while we can. It’s brutally hot out there.”
“Not as hot as it is in here, baby.” He ran his forefinger under my strap. “You look beautiful. Your skin, Minty, your skin…if I was a man of words, I would write a sonnet to your skin.”
“How about you compose a song instead?” I teased. “It’s lovely and cool in here.”
I rested my head back and closed my eyes to block out the street and the buses and the safe travels. I splayed my fingers wide and rested them on my thighs to avoid touching any of them and inadvertently adding weight to make them uneven.
I don’t think I ever took Jace or Alex alone after that. If I ever did, it was a rare case.
My eyes stung.
When the boys were five, I started picking them up from school occasionally. Every time, I felt the urge to crash the car. I knew it was OCD. I knew it. But in combination with the other thoughts of harm and especially those of sexual harm, I began to question if I should be around them.
At my next appointment, I told Ezinne that I was worried I might be a danger to them because of my OCD. God bless her, she didn’t make me explain my symptoms. She lay it out on the table, literally and metaphorically, explaining the different subtypes of OCD and the fluidity with which the disorder switched out one subtype for another, often causing the person to deal with several sets of symptoms at a time.
As long as I could remember, I always battled on multiple fronts.
Exposure. Desensitization. Response prevention.
What seemed at first to be an unbearable risk, treatment reduced to a niggling doubt, an annoyance. White noise.
Even the pedophilia OCD, I pushed past, getting to the point where the only accommodation I required was not spending one on one time with either of the boys for any amount of time.
Logically, I knew I was not a pedophile.
But OCD capitalized on my greatest fears. Perhaps it was more accurate to say it focused on those things that would be most abhorrent.
What if you lose control?
What if you’re wrong?
What if this is how all pedophiles start out?
Logically, I knew it was OCD.
But the pain of those doubts made any time I spent with those boys unbearable. And I was selfish. I wanted my time with those boys.
But also...
What if I was wrong?
It was possible, wasn’t it? Was it? I never felt one hundred per cent sure, therefore I never took the risk.
“Baby? You’re too quiet. What’s going on in that head of yours?”
“Give me a minute darling? I’m working through some OCD stuff. I’m okay,” I murmured, not wanting to lose my train of thought.
It had been more than a decade. I could trust myself.
I huffed out a laugh. In all the years OCD had offered options and suggestions for hurting people, physically or sexually, not once had I ever acted on any of those thoughts. Though at times I felt the physical sensation as if I was about to do it, I never had. I never wanted to.
